Microsoft and GE are calling their new health care joint venture Caradigm, and the companies have assigned several executives to key positions.
Microsoft and GE
Healthcare's
joint
venture in health care IT now has a name. The companies are calling their
corporate offspring Caradigm and have also installed a leadership team for the
new venture.
With the name
"Caradigm," Microsoft and GE are looking to create a
"paradigm" shift in "care" delivery from providing care of
a single-patient episode to continuous management of the population's health,
Microsoft reports.
The new company will focus
on aiding health care organizations and professionals through real-time
intelligence in a health care system to improve the quality of patient care,
according to Microsoft.
Following regulatory
approval, the two companies plan to launch Caradigm by the first half of 2012.
The company will employ about 750 people in the Seattle area near Microsoft's
home base of Redmond, Wash.
In December, Microsoft and
GE named Michael Simpson as CEO-designate of the new company.
"We have an exciting
opportunity to transform health care globally with an established open platform
and a new generation of applications focused on population health," said
Simpson in a statement.
The Website
caradigm.com currently belongs to CenCal
Health, a health plan provider for Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties,
in California, but Microsoft and GE are in discussions with CenCal to acquire
the Website,
Bloomberg Businesweek
reports.
CenCal let the
"Caradigm" trademark close in 2010, Microsoft reports. The joint
venture will have "an appropriate URL" by the time it launches,
according to Redmond.
Microsoft and GE will
demonstrate potential Caradigm products at the
HIMSS12 health care IT conference in
Las Vegas, which begins Feb. 20.
In addition to the new name,
GE and Microsoft also announced Feb. 13 that Dr. Brandon Savage, the chief
medical officer of GE Healthcare, will become chief medical officer and senior
vice president, product strategy, in the joint venture.
Caradigm's CTO and senior
vice president will be Neal Singh, currently general manager of Microsoft Dynamics
AX Global Financial Management.
Dynamics
AX is Microsoft's cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.
Meanwhile, Nigel Mason, who
has been with GE since 1986, will serve as chief operating officer. Mason is
currently director of GE Healthcare's Commercial Centre of Excellence, which
focuses on revamping the company's commercial structure, processes and tools.
Microsoft's health
intelligence platform Amalga will now become a Caradigm product, and GE will
move eHealth, its health information exchange (HIE) platform, and Qualibria,
its clinical knowledge application environment, into the joint venture.
Savage is the "thought
leader" for Qualibria, which is the result of a partnership between GE
Healthcare and
Intermountain
Healthcare, a nonprofit health system that serves Utah and southeastern
Idaho.
Caradigm will also offer
Microsoft Vergence (formerly Sentillion), a single sign-on and context
management solution. Microsoft
acquired
health care software vendor Sentillion in December 2009.
In addition, Caradigm's
product lineup includes Microsoft expreSSO, an enterprise single sign-on
solution. The application features a wizard tool that allows health care
organizations to implement single sign-on and retain total ownership of access
throughout a hospital.
The EHR platform Centricity
remains part of GE. On Feb. 2, GE announced a
new
version of its Centricity Patient Online portal, which adds Short Message
Service (SMS) texting between patients and doctors, as well as connectivity to HIEs.
Microsoft will also keep its
patient health platform, HealthVault, as part of the parent company. Redmond
launched a
Windows
Phone 7 app for HealthVault Dec. 13.
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